Burning Man
by LynnAgate
Summary: Max receives a frantic call for help. Disclaimer: Dark Angel is owned by James Cameron and Charles H. Eglee. For entertainment purposes only.
1. Chapter 1

"_Max, I need your help."_

He had called from a payphone in California. There was such urgency in his voice that Max felt an uneasy nerve shoot up her spine and disperse the feeling throughout her body.

"_Where are you?"_

"_In L.A. Hermosa Beach," he said huskily._

And she had left immediately, without a word to anyone, and without an idea of when she would be back. She had spent over sixteen hours on the Ninja, speeding over 1000 miles, only stopping for gas and a bit of food. It had been raining in Seattle when she left, and when she arrived in southern California and felt the warmth of the famous California sun, her feline DNA revved up her skin – she wanted to bask in the total lack of rain. She wondered if cats ever lay out in the sand.

Her stomach turned again when she thought about what he must have done this time, sick with worry over the severity of his voice as he cut to the chase: _Max, I need your help._

Finally, she caught up with him in a motel near Hermosa Beach.

_Something is very wrong,_ she thought. _It's too quiet. _She twisted the knob and walked into the dark room, shutting the door and the world out behind her.

Immediately adjusting to the darkness, she saw him, face-down on the shoddy mattress. Her heart pounded in her ears as she stepped closer. She placed a hand on his shoulder and with some effort, he turned his head.

"Max?" he asked. He couldn't see her. Both his eyes were swollen, his left more than his right, and his cheek had been lacerated. His lip was split and already scabbing. His messy hair was caked with dried blood. She sat on her knees in front of him, unable to understand why he didn't look like he normally did – sarcastic, jubilant, like trouble on legs.

He couldn't see that it was her, not for sure, but he could smell that it was her. Her essence mixed with the slight vanilla and the light cherries and saltiness – no one else smelled like she did, as intoxicating. She was unmistakable. He tried to roll himself over, stirring near-silently. The turn revealed more damage.

The front of him was almost completely covered in blood and a little sweat, and his legs were pretty banged up – she could see several cuts through his jeans.

"What happened?"

"I saw an ad in the newspaper with my number on it," he rasped, pointing to his barcode. "The message said ILA's cure. So I answered it."

Max's eyes began to water. "What's ILA's cure?"

He took a breath. "It's a cipher for you, Max. 452. Text."

"It was a trap."

"The Conclave."

Max could barely hold it together as she watched him struggle to sit up. She helped him to a sitting position. She tried to lift his shirt to see the damage, but he winced, stopping her with his bloodied, broken, sliced and swollen hand. Both hands had similar afflictions.

"You did this because of me?"

He didn't answer.

"Why?"

"You know why."

Max looked into his one good eye. "You can't do this – go off without telling me like there's some fire out there –"

His eye widened as he reached for her hand, and crushed it to his chest. "The fire's in here."

She was surprised he didn't cry out in pain. She could feel the carved flesh under his shirt. It made her closer to him. The closest to Alec she'd ever been.

"I'm a burning man, Max."


	2. Chapter 2

Max busied herself in the restroom, pulling the plastic ice bucket sans liner into the bathtub and letting it fill with warm water. She needed a few minutes to try to process what he had just said. What he had just confessed.

_It was a confession, right?_

She pulled down the hand towel and washcloth from the silver rack, catching a glimpse of herself in it. She looked tired, a little pale. But more than that, she looked upset, and her tears had made evident paths down her rosy cheeks.

_White went after Alec. He knew Alec would be baited if it involved me._ _Me._

Max slammed her fist into the wall above the towel rack, grinding her teeth.

_Leave it to Alec to do something stupid like this, _she thought, _without even telling me. _Max grunted in frustration. _And now he's torn up because of me._

Another frustrated tear slipped out the corner of her particularly disobedient eye. _Stop crying_, she scolded herself. _Soldiers don't cry._

She heard his words in her mind again: _I'm a burning man, Max._ Those words filled her with an unusual feeling. Like he was saying more than he said just by adding her name to the end of his sentence. Like she had something to do with his 'burning.'

_Did I hear that right? What does that mean?_ Max silently cursed herself for not asking. But then again, if she had asked, maybe he would have answered. And if he answered, maybe it would be something she wasn't ready for.

_Maybe I am ready to hear it,_ she thought, setting the terry-cloth on the toilet lid and staring herself in the mirror. Her hand was smudged with his blood, a casualty of his confession. Other than that, she knew she looked tired with red and puffy eyes, she knew her hair was tangled from the ride there, and she knew that with Alec in the condition he was in, she wouldn't be able to sleep for another day at least.

_After all, I came over a thousand miles because he asked me to. Because I was afraid I'd find him like this._

Max frowned at herself in the mirror. _Because of me._

_I guess I have shark DNA anyway. Who needs sleep?_

Max thought back to what Alec had said. _ILA's cure? Do I have some kind of disease or something? Why else would I need a cure?_

Ames White invaded her mind, filling her with fiery anger.

_White. That asshole deserves certain death. I could round up all the transgenics and transhumans that are living in the outside world and there'd be little he could do to stop us from tearing him to pieces, finishing the job Joshua started on him months ago._

The bucket was full. _Get it together, soldier_, she told herself. _Time to go back out to him._

She opened the door and found Alec right where she had left him – he was laying down again. Crossing the stained carpet over to him, she half-dreaded seeing him again. If White had any idea where Alec went, they wouldn't be safe here for very long, but he needed some time to heal before they moved.

She set the bucket and towels down on the floor next to the nightstand and pulled at Alec's arm.

"Hey," she said softly. "You awake?"

"You were only gone for a minute… Max," he said.

"Felt like longer," she said, without thinking. "We gotta get you out of those clothes."

Alec turned onto his back and mumbled, "I knew you wanted to see me naked."


	3. Chapter 3

"Yeah, I just never imagined it would be under these circumstances," she said, smiling. If he could see her, hopefully she would lift his mood.

_What am I even thinking? _She scolded herself. _My totally not-bashed-in face is going to cheer him up?_ Max growled under her breath.

"So… you admit you've imagined me naked," he joked.

Max imagined him naked for a moment, but it wasn't sexy and seductive like he would have thought. No, this time, he was covered in cuts and stab wounds and scratches and bruises. She nearly frowned, realizing yet again that he had taken one hell of a beating. _For me._

Max straightened her back. "Try to relax, if I do this right, you won't have to move much," she said.

"You sound like Lola," Alec mused with a near-smile.

Max sat next to him on the bed. "I'm gonna need you to try to sit up," she said, reaching for his neck. She curled her hand around his neck, fingering his barcode as she guided him toward her and into a sitting position.

She kept one hand at his neck and placed the other on his chest. She lightly padded at him, feeling around for any possible broken bones. Alec winced at her touch, his lips quivering as he drew in a labored breath. _Must be worse than I thought. _She pressed lightly on his chest again and he let out a grumbling moan in an attempt to hold back.

"What did he do to you?" she asked, trying to determine the least painful way she could get to his injuries.

Though moments ago he had just grabbed her hand and placed it on his chest with some force, Max didn't want Alec to strain himself. She pushed her hair over her shoulders, shrugged her coat off onto a chair, and returned to her patient.

She pulled at one of the various tears in his shirt until it revealed his chest. He was deeply lacerated, bloodied, and bruised underneath it all. It looked like he had been flogged, cut shallowly, maybe burned in certain areas.

Certainly, it was something from which he would heal – he was transgenic after all, and that came with specific quick-healing rates, but this did not look good, which meant it did not feel good, and he was holding his breath, which meant he didn't want her to pick up on how much it hurt.

She slipped the raggedy shirt over his shoulders, her fingertips sliding over his skin, and felt another set of tears ready to break through.

"Asshole," she mumbled. "I'll kill him."

She thought again about ILA's cure while she dipped the first towel into the water. _The retro-virus bullshit is not worth this. Why would you do this, Alec? You don't even like Logan._

She didn't bother ringing it out. "This should be warm," she said, laying the crumpled wet towel on one shoulder and squeezing some of the water onto the surface.

Tiny rivulets formed as the water fell with gravity down his back and chest, turning a tint of red as it moved down until it hit the top of his jeans. Max gently lifted the towel to see the damage. He had been healthily sliced, but he was already healing there. She slowly opened the towel and laid it on his shoulder, then dragged it down his arm as gingerly as possible.

"Are you giving me a sponge bath?" he asked. She remembered with two swollen eyes, he couldn't see. He could only feel what she was doing to him.

Max repeated the treatment to his other shoulder. "I have to take care of these cuts," she said, refusing to let him trivialize what had happened with a corny jest.

She stood up a little and peeked over his shoulder to see how bad it was on his back. He had a few shallow cuts.

"I didn't let them," he offered hoarsely. His voice was honest and without pretense.

She almost cried. Again. If he had taken most of the damage to his face and his chest and the front of his body, then every time she saw him, she would always be reminded of what her existence had done to him. If he didn't know her, if they had never met in her cell at Manticore, this would never have happened. Consumed by guilt, she let one frustrated tear fall and felt grateful he couldn't see her.

"Lay back," she said. She helped lower his head to the pillow.

Max returned the shoulders-towel to the bucket and rinsed it, watching as the water took on a pink hue.

_Like me, _she thought. _I'm like a poison. Once I get in involved, there's always going to be a trace of poison in the water._

She rung out the water and folded the towel in half. She gently laid it on his eyelids to help with the swelling and with cleaning his skin. He let out a labored breath.

Max dipped the next pristine white towel into the bucket and rung out some of the water. She unwound the towel and laid it gently on his chest. She watched as his blood seeped up into the towel's fibers, racing out from the middle like an exploding shoreline.

She hovered over him a second. "I'm taking your pants off," she announced, placing a warm hand at his abdomen so he wouldn't be startled. She watched his face for any hesitation, but when he said nothing, she unbuttoned and unzipped his jeans, then grabbed the side seams of the denim and pulled them down. She went to the foot of the bed, removed his shoes, and yanked at the ankles of the denim to remove the pants the rest of the way.

He lay before her in boxers and socks, and said nothing. No sarcastic remarks, no jokes about undressing him, no complaints of anything hurting or stinging. Nothing.

He trusted her.


	4. Chapter 4

It was terrible. The purpled cuts and bruises on his legs mirrored those on his torso and face. It even looked like he had a skinned knee, as if he had slid across the pavement somewhere and hadn't bothered to look after the injury. Maybe because he was busy making sure he would survive. Or maybe because he was running for his life.

Alec's foot twitched, and that's when she noticed the blood at his ankle. She knelt at the foot of the bed, and gently, she peeled the sock down his rawed skin. There were bits of asphalt in his wound.

"Alec," she started, feeling a wave of desperation overwhelm her. His whole body was reddened with injuries, until the very pulp of it ached at the surface. He was doing an admirably stoic job of taking it all like a man – doing his best not to make a sound. Her eyes welled, the wetness blurring her vision until the rugged man before her seemed like the saddest, most beautiful surrealistic painting she'd ever seen. She squeezed her eyes and let gravity pull her tears down. She moved to his other sock and, after some inspection, pulled the sock off slowly to reveal his other foot was only slightly bruised.

She saw his stomach move up and down with breath, the beats of which increased as she pushed to speak. Full of gratitude that he was miraculously still breathing, she squeezed her eyes shut again and dropped her hands and his sock to her lap. "Alec, I'm so sorry." She held her breath in an effort to hide how guilty and girly she felt, crying at his feet. He was transgenic, and he was smart, so he would probably hear it in her voice anyway. But soldiers weren't supposed to cry. She wasn't supposed to cry.

"Don't say that," he groused.

She heard the slight crumpling of the sheets and a couple of rusty springs, and before she could bring herself to open her eyes, she felt the ridges of his fingertips sweeping along her cheek. He thumbed the tear over her cheek. "It's not your fault."

Max opened her eyes, still blurry with tears. He had sat up without complaint, both towels falling to his lap, and sat at the edge of the bed with the lesser of his injured hands stretched out to her face. His right eye fixed on hers, the pupil surrounded by a thin layer of hazel, burning green-gold into her. The effort of willing his lids open barely enough to see her struck her at her core. She ached that he was in so much pain, yet, that he exerted so much energy just to make sure she knew the sincerity of what he was saying. Just to comfort her.

Ashamed, Max felt more tears welling in her eyes and attempted to look down. "Of course it's my fault," she said so low that only a transgenic could have heard it. "If I wasn't here, you'd never have been tortured, you wouldn't be bleeding, you'd-"

"I'd be dead," he interrupted. "Several times over by now."

She looked back to him and saw how normal it seemed to be for his eye to want to close. She thought about how selfish she was acting. He was the one who almost died – for her – and here he was, reaching out to her with injured hands, touching her so gently she might continue crying from the tenderness.

He'd gone out on his own to get what he probably thought was the cure to the retrovirus, an item he had no responsibility of procuring, and he'd been caught and tortured for it.

It occurred to Max that she didn't know how he had escaped. Opening her eyes and pulling his hand from her face, she snatched one of the towels from his lap and gently rubbed at his hand. "How did it happen?"


	5. Chapter 5

Alec's face twitched as she gently rubbed at his bloodied hand. "Sorry," she said. She wasn't sure how much gentler she could be while still helping him.

"I went to Los Angeles a few days ago after seeing the ad," he began.

_A few days ago?_ Max's eyes narrowed with hatred, imagining squeezing the life out of Ames White. _He had Alec for a few days. Tortured him for a few days._

"Ow, take it easy, will ya?" Alec interrupted her thoughts.

She had been so focused on hating White that she had squeezed his hand a little too hard. She immediately loosened her grip. "Sorry," she couldn't prevent herself from saying. She returned to making tiny circles on his skin with the cloth.

"It was a trap," he admitted. "There were about seven or eight guys."

Max imagined being surrounded by them. He must have thought he was going to die.

"I didn't have an advantage. I couldn't gain the higher ground. They just kept on me until I finally got one of them in a hold."

Max's eyes welled. _He had to kill someone because of me._

"I just cut off his oxygen until he passed out," he said, as if reading her mind.

Max sniffed back her tears.

"But by then, I'd been backed into a corner and a couple of guys were threatening tasers, and before I knew it, they shocked me into unconsciousness."

Underneath her attempted brave exterior, Max had one big burning question. But he'd already answered it. Or maybe she thought she knew the answer. Why? Why would he do this? Why couldn't she figure it out? She needed to think.

"When I woke up, I was hanging by a shackle. By my foot. Hurt like hell, so I figured they had dragged me through gravel or something. I don't know why they wouldn't wait until I was awake to do it."

He was thinking strategically about his own torture. _Oh, Manticore was so fucked up_. Max released his hand and dunked the cloth into the bucket again.

"Probably because I'm so bad-ass they'd look back and see me reading a magazine and thanking them for the lift."

The image sent a smile to her lips. _Yeah, he'd definitely do something like that, just to prove they couldn't break him._

"There it is," he said appreciatively.

Max looked up to him. His one good eye watched her lips. It made her self-conscious, and it made her guilty again. His lip was busted and scabbed, and hers was fine. And he was looking at her, trying to make her smile.

Max let her smile fall and reached for his other hand, a movement he had anticipated. He reached it out to her and closed his eye at the warmth her hands provided.

He shifted a little, Max noticed. Maybe to ease some of the pain. She went to work on his hand and he continued.

"After that, it was stinging, shallow cuts, needles full of who-knows-what, swinging from the chain like one of those stupid punching clown things. No matter how hard they hit me, I always swung back for more."

Helpless to his story-telling, Max felt those tears sneaking up on her again. It was so unfair, that he had gone through all of that. And miraculous that he'd somehow gotten away.

"But either they felt they exhausted me and I knew nothing, or they had other, more important plans to attend to, because they just left me there, hanging. My head hurt like a bitch from all the blood, but I pulled myself up and grabbed the chain and started feeling around for weakness in it."

Max looked up and let his hand slip from hers. He looked deflated. Suddenly, she couldn't think of why she had cleaned his hands. A tiny voice in her head betrayed her. _So he can touch you, _it said.

Moving to the ankle in question, Max ushered his leg up by the calf and gently set his heel on her thigh. She leaned over to inspect where the gravel was embedded into his skin. "Does this hurt?" she asked, prodding at his skin gently and watching his face for signs of discomfort.

"Just do what you have to," he said. "I can take it."

Filled with self-hatred, Max used the edge of her fingernail to dig out the bits of asphalt and road. Stupid foreign objects stuck in him. She could feel the slight squirms he couldn't help but make as she dug out piece after piece, until she was satisfied that none were under the skin enough to require her brutal mercy. A few pockets of injuries, fresh from her picking, leaked pebbles of blood.

She reached for the towel again and dunked it in the water. "This one might sting more," she said.

Alec continued his story, his volume uneven as he felt the pricking of the cloth against his tender road rash. "I found a weak link about ten feet up and pried it open. Fell to the ground, got the wind knocked out of me, but no one was there. Maybe it was the adrenaline. Found my way here, called you outside, and landed on the bed."

Max took in a breath. "Alec," she said apologetically.

"Don't," he said.

"But Alec, you didn't have to-"

His teeth seemed to grind out of frustration. "Yes I did, and I would do it again."

Max sat back on her heels. He would walk into certain death all over again? For her?

"I need to get some antiseptic and ice," she said, climbing to her feet. "I'll be right back."

Alec sighed.

She wasn't ready to talk about any of this. It was all making her a melting pot of emotions. Anger fused to sadness, combusted into guilt and eroded back into anger again. She needed to think.

_This shit with White's gotta stop._


	6. Chapter 6

"Do you know if you were followed?" she asked, standing.

His eyes twitched under their swollen lids and he shook his head. "Don't think so. Would be dead by now, right?"

Max frowned as another thought occurred to her. "How did you get a room, looking like you do?"

"Told him I was a boxer and had just lost my first fight. Paid cash."

She didn't believe him. Would anyone believe that the man before her – cut, swollen, bruised, burned – had just participated in a boxing match? And survived? "He believe you?"

"No, but pay him enough and he doesn't ask questions."

After making sure he'd be comfortable – well, as comfortable as a man who'd endured days of torture could be – Max excused herself to purchase the antiseptic, and new jeans and a shirt for Alec. His old stuff was forever-ruined, thrashed. She also lifted a new bucket and scooped some ice on her way back to the room.

When she returned to the room, he was right where she'd left him, laying flat on the shabby bed. Max picked up the bloody towels and bucket, and went back to the bathroom, this time, not shutting the door completely.

She dumped the bloody water into the bath tub and ran the faucet. She stretched out the balled up towel full of Alec's universal donor blood and let the cold water run over it. The first wring produced the greatest amount of crimson runoff, and Max gritted her teeth as she saw the undertow of the draining water streak with his blood. She let the rag satiate with water and then twisted it, folding one twisted side over the other, and then twisted it again. More rose-colored tints dripped out.

She felt her heart pumping harder, felt her jaw grinding her teeth until they clamped in a snarl, felt her whole body tense with the anxiety that this stupid towel would never be pristine again. She wrung it over and over until her knuckles stung from the towel rubbing against it so fervently. Her vision became blurry with frustrated tears, which only angered her further. She released the ends of the towel and let it sag into the bathwater.

_White doesn't deserve my tears, _she thought, narrowing her eyes and willing herself to stop crying.

As she imagined all of the things he and the cult had done to Alec, her hands twisted and squeezed the towel tighter and harder, again and again, until when she looked down, she saw the sharp curves of her knuckles had turned white.

She gave up on the towels and made her way back to him. Nearing him meant watching the way the coagulated blood on his lip moved as he mouthed words which she couldn't hear. She stepped closer to him, trying to tell if he was in pain, or hallucinating, or maybe telling her the location of the warehouse, or just plain figure out what he was saying.

It only took her a few seconds to figure out he had been counting.

_184, 185, 186…_

"Hey," she said gently, sitting on the bed next to him. "I'm here."

His head moved toward her and he stopped counting.

"Sorry I left you for one hundred and eighty six seconds." She ran a thumb across his forehead, clearing a few clumps of hair from it. "I'm back now. We're gonna get you all iced up, and once your wounds close up, you get to put on the fly new clothes I got you."

"'Kay, Maxie," he said barely above a mumble.

As she motioned to retract her hand, he reached out for it again and held it to his chest. His heart beat quasi-normally now, and she could see he was relaxing his limbs one at a time. She wouldn't dare remove her hand. It was the sheer act of touching which seemed to calm him, and he needed to rest to heal.

Max kept her hand against his carved skin, doing her best not to cry and wake him up while she memorized his injuries by touch.


End file.
